tergiversations

Major Margaret Witt, air force nurse and poster girl, discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: the judge who ordered her reinstated declared, “There is no evidence that wounded troops care about the sexual orientation of the flight nurse or medical technicians tending to their wounds.”

Before the campaign was done, Suits and Streets and gay men and lesbians were working together in the movement for civil rights—for the first time ever on a large scale.

(The INS paid the PHS no mind; the old definition continued to be used until the US Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990.)

inimical

“We’ve got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a perverted human being,” Helms had told the Senate when he proposed an amendment adding “sexual abstinence only” to a $300 million appropriation bill for AIDS education. (The Senate supported him, 94 to 2.59

Captain Collins remained standing as he read it. Matlovich saw the captain’s eyes grow “big as baseballs.”18 Then the captain sat down. “What the hell does this mean?” he asked. “It means Brown v. Board of Education,” Matlovich answered, because Captain Collins, a black man, would immediately understand.

Life magazine—in an alarming article that asked, “Do the Homosexuals, Like the Communists, Intend to Bury Us?”

As the attorney general was walking up the grand staircase to the baroque rotunda to meet them, she tweeted her followers: “About to marry the Prop 8 plaintiffs, Kristin Perry and Sandy Stier. Wedding bells are ringing.”41